It took a long time for Tommy to recover from his depression, but that didn’t mean he didn’t look after us. Food was short and many people were hungry and on the point of starvation, especially in the poorest families. It wasn’t only the war that caused the shortages. In Smithfield wholesale market, a second ‘under-the-counter’ market had sprung up. Profiteers bought up any food available at crazy high prices and sold it on to the filthy rich who were the only people who could afford it. Policemen who saw this going on were often given a sweetener to persuade them to look the other way.
I think we’d have starved if it hadn’t been for Tommy and Jimmy. Tommy still had one or two contacts in Smithfield market and Jimmy covered for him at the Wallworks while Tommy slipped out to see what he could scrounge. If they’d been found out, it would have meant the immediate sack for the two of them but things were so desperate, there was little choice. On these sorties,Tommy managed to pick up a few vegetables and even the occasional fish. I never inquired how he’d come by them and he never volunteered to tell me.
One day, just before Christmas 1917, Tommy really did take a big chance. I was expecting again and finding extra fare was getting more and more difficult despite the fact
that the government had brought in food rationing, and despite the Virol and the Scott’s Emulsion Tommy was always plying me with every day. In honour of our good friends, we had decided to call this latest addition Angela, if a girl, and James, if a boy. That was, if it survived at all considering the inadequate nourishment it was receiving.
It was a cold December. Some Christmas we’re going to have, I thought. Both the grate and the pantry were empty and me and the children were having to wrap ourselves in blankets to keep warm. To add to the general air of depression, the news from the front was not good and our soldiers seemed to be bogged down in Flanders mud.
About half past five on the morning of 24 December, Tommy appeared at the door. He was out of breath and kept looking over his shoulder. He was carrying a large shopping bag filled to overflowing with all kinds of food: eggs, butter, sausages, fish, a wide selection of vegetables, bread, and even a pot of jam.
‘Quick, Kate, hide this stuff in the scullery!’ he panted. He went to the window to check that he hadn’t been followed.
‘Where in God’s name did you get this stuff?’
‘Don’t ask!’ he exclaimed, then went on to tell me. ‘The wide boys come into the market throwing their money around. There’s nothing they can’t buy if they wave a few fivers about. Well, this here crook swaggered round the stalls flaunting his wallet and buying up the best food in the market. At Deakins, he put his bag down for a minute and went to inspect some tangerines and dates. Dates! I ask you! Where in God’s name had they come from? Anyroad, quick as a flash I picked up his bag and I was off and I haven’t stopped running since.’
‘Did anyone see you?’
‘Not a soul. And remember, officially I’m still clocked
on at the Wallworks until the hooter goes at six.’
‘Don’t you think it’s wrong,Tommy, stealing somebody else’s grub?’
Tommy looked at me and his two daughters. ‘No. This shyster had loads of money and can easily replace the food. We can’t.’
Tommy went back to the Wallworks to clock off. Next day, Christmas Day, we had the most wonderful dinner I can ever remember. And did we feel guilty as we tucked in?
Not one bit.
And I’m sure the baby that was born the following month was also grateful for that meal. We called him Jim after our friend, as we’d promised.
‘What a terrible time for a child to be born, in the middle of the worst war in history,’ Mrs Kenyon said. Quoting from her endless list of old wives’ tales, she continued, ‘There used to be a saying in my family: a child born out of sorrow will be a happy child.’
‘I hope you’re right, Madge,’ I said, thinking that somewhere there must be another saying to contradict it.
The food shortages continued well into 1918 and what little there was available was expensive, except for bread. That was sixpence for a two-pound loaf and the price never went up throughout the war. That’s about the only good thing I can say for it because it was horrible stuff. Heavy, chewy and doughy, made from God knows what - spuds, I think. Still, we were glad to get it when we could. When word got round that the Maypole or the Co-op on Oldham Road had had a delivery, there was a frantic dash to get in the queue which formed at six o’clock in the morning. Often there were near riots, especially when after three hours standing in line the copper on duty announced, ‘That’s all there is, ladies. Time to go home.’
Priority in the queue was usually given to mothers with
babies and this was enforced by the policeman controlling the crowd. Not a popular rule this, as it was not unknown for a woman to borrow a baby in order to jump the queue. One bitterly cold February morning I’d been standing in line for a couple of hours. I had young Jim with me and to keep him warm I’d wrapped him up tight under my shawl. The policeman announced the bad news. ‘Only ten more loaves left.’
He counted out the required number and told the others that they may as well go home and wait for the next delivery. I was number ten and so just scraped in among the lucky few. Three places ahead of me was another woman with a baby. The lady behind me, number eleven, suddenly went berserk.
‘I know that woman ahead in the queue, the one with the baby! Her name’s Edna Blenkinsop and she lives in our street. She doesn’t have a baby! Why, she’s not even married!’
I’m sure that, had it not been for the copper, the crowd, would have lynched the Blenkinsop woman, whether she was a Miss or a Mrs. The offending lady, along with the baby who was an accessory to the crime, was frog-marched roughly from the queue. I think in England queue-jumping was regarded as worse than stealing or baby-bashing. Anyroad, the attention of the frustrated woman was now turned on me.
‘Ask that woman with the bundle under the shawl if that’s her baby, if it is a baby she has there,’ Mrs Nasty demanded. ' ’
‘Well, is it?’ the policeman asked.
There in the street, I had to unfurl my shawl to prove
that indeed there was a baby and, furthermore, I was
breast-feeding it! All for one loaf!
★ ★ ★
Later that year when it seemed that people could bear the misery of the war no longer, there came rumours of peace. Just as in August 1914 none of us believed that a war would happen, so now we couldn’t believe that peace would come. Tommy had gone to work and I was giving the kids their breakfast when I heard the wild cheering on Oldham Road. Madge Kenyon came banging on the door.
‘Kate, Kate! It’s over! The war’s over!’
In the next street, a barrel organ balanced on one long wooden leg played a medley of patriotic songs whilst the old women in their bonnets and capes danced a jig. The news finally penetrated my brain and for the rest of the day my eyes kept filling with tears as I remembered the dearly loved ones who would not be around to celebrate the peace. Four days after the Armistice was signed, there was a big celebration in Albert Square. There were hundreds of disabled young men, some on crutches, some in wheelchairs. They don’t have much to celebrate, I thought.
After the cheering and the singing, Tommy and I returned home in sombre and reflective mood.
‘Well,’ said Tommy when we reached Back Murray Street that night, ‘so it’s over at last. And what was it all for? Millions of men on both sides killed and maimed so that we could keep our honour. It’s been a high price to pay. We’ve suffered just about everything that fate could throw at us. War, death, famine.’
‘If you’re talking about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Tommy,’ I said thinking back to my religious instruction lessons, ‘you’ve missed one.’
‘Which one is that?’
‘Pestilence.’
‘Don’t tempt providence, Kate,’ he said.
★ ★ ★
In our family Uncle Barney was the first to get it. Spanish flu, they said it was. I don’t know why poor old Spain got the blame for it unless it was that their King was one of the early victims.
Barney’s illness started one day when he was on his way home after looking for a job on a building site. His cough developed from the usual hacking noise to this terrifying dog-like bark. Soon he was gasping for breath and sweating like a bull. Dr Cooklin went round to see him and told him it was nothing to worry about, a case of three-day flu, that was all. The doctor said the usual thing, how there was a lot of it about and all that. Aunt Sarah put Barney to bed in the front parlour and dosed him with Veno’s Cough Cure. She wanted to put a fire in there but there wasn’t a piece of coal to be had anywhere. Tommy and I went round to see him. One look and we sensed it was the end for poor old Barney. His breathing was harsh and he complained of pains in his head, ears, and eyes. He himself seemed to know he’d reached the end of the road but he appeared more concerned about the fate of his rabbits than himself.
‘Kate, promise me one thing when I’m gone,’ he wheezed. ‘Don’t let Sarah turn my pets into rabbit pie. They’ve been my best friends for so long and I’d like them to have new owners who will take good care of them.’
When Sarah took Barney his tea on the morning following our visit, she found him dead. We were so very sorry to hear the news but weren’t that surprised as Barney had been ailing for most of his life.
Tommy and I managed to sell his rabbitry to a pet shop inTib Street. So Barney had his dying wish and his ‘friends’ hopefully found good homes. In many ways, he’d been lucky to have Sarah looking after him all those years. She had always been as strong as an ox and never had a day’s illness in her life.
It was when she went down with it that we grasped that something serious was going on. Not only did she develop that peculiar cough that Barney’d had but there were flecks of bright blood coming from her mouth as well. After a couple of hours sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, Mam and me managed to get Cooklin round to see her. Doctors were like gold, as there was such a shortage because of the war and that. Poor old Dr Cooklin! He wasn’t looking too well himself; he looked jiggered as this wave of sickness had run him off his feet. What put the wind up us more than anything, though, was that he was wearing a flesh- coloured gauze mask which gave off a strong smell of cinnamon and cloves, making him look like a circus clown. What was all this about? He told us to bathe Sarah’s forehead with cool compresses and to give her lots of fluids, especially hot soups. It was important to keep the room well-ventilated and no one must smoke. When I asked him what was wrong with her, he didn’t seem sure and mumbled something about the grippe and pneumonia. Anyroad, Mam and me fixed up a roster to look after her. I arranged with Mrs Kenyon to baby-sit with the three kids whilst Tommy went to work and I took my turn to take care of my aunt.
We weren’t needed long, though, ’cos she died two days later. Her last words were from the song she’d sung at my dad’s funeral so long ago, ‘Barney Take Me Home Again’. We hoped Barney was listening. Family and neighbours were deeply saddened by Sarah’s death but Mam was heartbroken at the loss of her elder and only sister. As for me, I was beginning to accept death as a normal part of existence.
In early 1919, despite his gauze mask, Dr Cooklin himself died. A case of the same sickness, everyone said, but complicated by overwork and nervous exhaustion. With
our doctor gone and no replacement available, there was nothing for it but to take care of ourselves.
There were so many deaths taking place that my little world seemed to be collapsing around my ears and I learned how fragile life was. Friends, relatives, neighbours who had always been there, a constant in the background, like the town hall clock or the wallpaper in the parlour, were going down like skittles. Uncle Barney should have been in his yard with his rabbit hutches, Aunt Sarah tending the second-hand clothing stall. Dr Cooklin in his surgery, but day by day the social landscape was altering beyond recognition. And it was happening so fast that everything seemed unreal and I felt hollow inside. Resigned to fate. Who knew what tomorrow would bring?
Tommy had told me about the spread of this influenza a few weeks back when he was reading bits of the news out to me. He said millions had died of it in China and India but I hadn’t taken too much notice at the time. More of those hordes again. I’d thought, they’re always dying of something in their millions out there in the Far East. A pandemic, Tommy said it was because it had spread right across the world and in some parts of Asia and Africa whole populations had been swept away like a tidal wave. The Daily Express reckoned that it killed twenty-seven million people across the world - twice as many as the war itself. The strange thing about this influenza, we were told, was that it was most deadly not for the elderly and young children, but for people in their prime, between the ages of twenty and forty, who either had a speedy recovery or a speedy death. Not always true, we thought, ’cos in our family our two deaths had been getting on a bit. Also not true for Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson who had also picked up the bug and they certainly weren’t in their prime. That said, it was true for the thousands of
brawny young soldiers who had managed to survive shot, shell and gas in the trenches but died swiftly when the ‘Spanish Lady 5 came to visit. I know it was selfish of me but how relieved I was to know that my young children would probably escape the infection. Then it struck me like a bolt out of the blue. Tommy and me were in the danger age range! He was thirty-three and I was thirty- two.
‘Please, God,’ I prayed aloud, ‘for the sake of our children, don’t let Tommy or me get it.’
One night. Tommy came home from the pub where he, along with his cronies, had been thrashing out policies for dealing with the big problems of the day.
‘I was talking with some of the lads in the Queen’s Arms,’ he began, ‘and we reckon this flu bug is a secret weapon of the Germans like the mustard gas they used during the war. They’ve set it loose to get revenge for losing the war.’
‘How do you account for the fact that Germany’s had twice as many deaths as we’ve had?’
‘I dunno. Maybe the wind blew the bugs back in their faces.’
‘You and your cronies in the pub talk a load of rubbish,’ I said.
Some newspapers said the bug had come from American pigs brought over by the soldiers and spread through the trenches. Others said it had come from France in those rat-infested trenches our Eddie had been going on about. I didn’t know what to believe but whatever it was, now that the illness had touched our own family and folk in the next street were popping their clogs, I realised how deadly the disease had become. The Manchester Evening News told us that half the city was in bed with it, but in Ancoats it must have been more because whole
families were going down like flies. Sometimes whole streets of families were dangerously ill with no one to look after them. The scourge became so widespread that it featured in kids’ games. One day, I heard Flo outside in the street playing skip rope with her friends to the rhyme:
I had a little bird Its name was Enza I opened the window An’ in-flu-enza.
When the death toll in Britain reached two hundred thousand, Lloyd George began making regulations and issuing advice. Good ventilation and fresh air, he said, were the best measures for prevention, and any gathering which involved mixing of bodies or sharing of breath was banned. Schools, dance halls, and cinemas were closed and big public funerals were forbidden since they meant crowds. Trams and buses were thought to be a special menace because of their bad ventilation. Churches were allowed to stay open but were told to keep services short - which was about the only good news we had that year. At the Lent service at St Chad’s where we were supposed to line up and kiss the feet on the crucifix, people didn’t seem too keen on the idea, especially as the cloth the altar boy was using to dab the feet after each kiss didn’t look too clean. I noticed that each sinner made sure he didn’t make actual lip contact with the crucifix. And God help anyone who coughed or sneezed during Mass! In seconds they found themselves isolated on the bench. Even the shopkeepers weren’t taking any chances. At the Maypole on Oldham Road, old Jed Waite, whom I’d known for years, didn’t take his pipe out of his mouth as he sliced a pound of butter from the block.
‘Smoking’s good for you,’ he spluttered to the housewives waiting their turn. ‘It clears your pipes and keeps the Spanish Lady away.’
‘I’m sure it does, Jed,’ I said, ‘especially if you smoke old socks like you do.’
No w many people wore flesh-coloured gauze masks and one or two of the women had pomanders round their necks. Lord knows what spices they had stuffed into them but judging from the pong, it was time many of them had a change.
The big question in everyone’s mind was: who would it strike next?
The answer came for our family a couple of days later. Mam and Frank McGuinness.They both went down with it suddenly one night in the pub as they were knocking back their daily quota of stout. As well as the normal flu symptoms of headache and fever, they were struck down with dizziness, a harsh cough and endless sneezing. Once more, I left my good friend Mrs Kenyon in charge of my young family in order to care for my sick relatives and their two children. It was hard to know what to do as even the doctors were at a loss. All kinds of quack remedies were being bandied about. Snuff, one journalist claimed, was the answer; another advised a pack of towels soaked in hot vinegar; still others, strong doses of whisky and sugar in a glass of hot milk - very popular, that one. The Evening Chron advised people to stop borrowing books, stop shaving, and stop shaking hands. About as daft as the old folk remedies Mam was insisting on from her sickbed.
‘In Ireland, Kate,’ she said, ‘we found that goose-grease poultices and salt up the nose always worked.’
‘I’m sure they did, Mam,’ I said. ‘They either killed or cured.’
I ignored these crazy solutions and adopted my own common-sense methods by keeping them both warm and supplying them with lots of hot onion soup which I’d heard acted as an antiseptic. How effective it would be I wasn’t sure but at least it was better than sitting around doing nothing.
I was kept busy ministering to the two victims as well as washing, dressing, and feeding young John and Hetty and doing the daily shopping. On the third morning, Mam opened her eyes with the fever and the cough completely gone. The flu had flown away as quickly as it had arrived. Not so with Frank. His condition was worse and he went into rapid decline.
He lay on the bed with bloodshot eyes, his face a bluish colour. He struggled for air and every cough brought up blood-stained saliva.
‘You’re going to be all right, Frank,’ I lied.
Frank didn’t say anything. He looked at me dully but didn’t see me. In a strained voice he began a conversation with imaginary comrades.
‘No need to worry, boys! General Buller will soon be here with reinforcements. And what a day that’ll be! The relief of Ladysmith, eh lads! Medals for everyone!’
All that day he raved deliriously and was in and out of consciousness. The next day, he seemed to rally and our hopes rose. Perhaps he’s going to pull through, we thought. But our hopes were dashed. Next day he was as bad as ever.
‘I think it’s all up with me, Kate,’ he said between bouts of hacking. ‘I’m sorry that you and I haven’t always seen eye to eye but I want you to know that I’ve always held you in the highest respect.’
‘Frank,’ I answered, tears springing to my eyes, ‘I’m so sorry too, though I think the fault has been mainly mine. I
couldn’t accept the idea of anyone taking the place of my dad. I was wrong and I had this mad notion of trying to go back to the old days. I was so stupid trying to live in the past. Can you ever forgive me?’
‘Perhaps we were both at fault, Kate, in not seeing each other’s point of view. I was an intruder and I made no allowance for your feelings. As for forgiving you, there’s nothing to forgive.’
Frank died the next day.
Mam was beside herself with grief. In the space of three years, she had lost her son, her sister, and now her husband, not to mention two of her grandchildren. Her life had been turned upside down. Like me, she became resigned to death and the notion that suffering was a necessary part of life. I held her tight in a consoling embrace and in that moment we were closer than we had been for many years.
Arranging Frank’s funeral was no easy matter. There was enough insurance money to cover it but there was a terrible shortage of undertakers and grave-diggers and the authorities had to make use of the cold meat storage depot as the bodies piled up. And it was a strange funeral service we held; regulations allowed us only fifteen minutes to get through it because there was another cortege waiting outside.
‘This is like the Black Death and the bubonic plague we learned about at school,’ I said to Tommy when we finally buried Frank at Moston Cemetery.
‘It’s worse, Kate,’ Tommy said, ‘because more people have died in this plague. If it goes on like this, I think it’ll be the end of civilisation.’
But Tommy’s fears did not materialise because mysteriously the Spanish Lady faltered and by the end of 1919 she was gone.